This year, BlogForever once again presented our consortium’s efforts at re:publica, Germany´s biggest conference for social media issues and innovation (http://www.re-publica.de/). The conference took place for the seventh year in Berlin with about 5.000 visitors. 450 speakers presented workshops, discussions and talks from the 6th to the 8th of May about the latest developments in social media all over the world. In such an environment of active bloggers and fresh ideas, it was a great pleasure to be included and have the chance to discuss our project with the people whose content we hope to preserve.

It was both interesting and promising to see that the content of those discussions had changed from the previous year at re:publica. Many of our booth visitors were already informed and convinced that weblogs should be acknowledged as an important piece of our cultural heritage. Additionally, they were supportive of a more robust preservation, one that can better accommodate future research and improve accessibility for the public. The current situation in Syria and other crisis regions in Northern African countries were especially noted as underlining the necessity and importance of independent blogging and the access of such information for journalists, researchers and the public in general.
While bloggers wanted to inform themselves about ways to preserve their own blog more completely and securely, they also asked for ways to disseminate their blog more efficiently. Some individuals indicated interest in a large-scale solution, similar to the internet archive (http://archive.org) in the United States, for European weblogs. BlogForever also met with researchers at several European universities who represented communities of expert bloggers focusing on specific thematic areas, such as science or technology. Several of these individuals expressed the need for a blog preservation solution which could strengthen research networks.

We have come a long way in spreading the message about the importance of digital preservation, in particular of weblogs. The public is now ready to dream about the ways in which preservation can be valuable in the present as well as the future.

In addition to the meeting, technical partners participated in a full day workshop focused on the development of the BlogForever platform.

The CeBIT is (http://www.cebit.de/en/about-the-trade-show/facts-figures/about-cebit-2013)

the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. The key target groups are users from industry, the wholesale/retail sector, skilled trades, banks, the services sector, government agencies, science and all users passionate about technology. CeBIT offers an international platform for comparing notes on current industry trends, networking, and product presentations.

The BlogForever project will participate as part of the TU Berlin pavillion. You can find us in Hall 9, Stand C20.

The coordinator (AUTH) presented the status and the overall achievements of the project, that are summarized in the project statement. The review continued with partners from UW and TUB presenting the results of the study that the project conducted for Weblog Structure and Semantics (WP2). UG continued by analysing the development of the Preservation Strategy for blogs (WP3) and the advances that this task brings to the state of the art. Initial thoughts for the Interoperability Prospects and for the Digital Rights Management Policy development were also presented by AUTH and mokono (Populis) respectively. The review meeting continued with a combined presentation of the BlogForever software infrastructure (WP4) and the BlogForever case studies (WP5). CERN presented the status of the development while UL presented the plan for the implementation and validation of the case studies. CERN made a demonstration of the BlogForever repository while Cyberwatcher presented the interface and functionality of the BlogForever spider. Finally, Tero presented the dissemination activities during the last six months of the project and continued with the presentation of the plan for the exploitation of the project results; results of the market analysis study were presented together with the initial plan for the development of the BlogForever business model.

The meeting ended up with the feedback the two reviewers and the project officer gave to the consortium. The reviewers congratulated the BlogForever team stressing their opinion on the exemplary project management and the conceptual work that furthers the state of the art, and at the same time showing their satisfaction on the technical part and project.

• The development of BlogForever Policies regarding blog preservation (WP3),
• The current progress of BlogForever platform development (WP4),
• The first case studies (WP5),
• The BlogForever business model (WP6).

The preservation problem is undoubtedly going to look complicated if we concentrate on the live blogosphere. It’s an environment that is full of complex behaviours and mixed content. Capturing it and replaying it presents many challenges.

But what type of content is going into the BF repository? Not the live blogosphere. What’s going in is material generated by the spider: it’s no longer the live web. It’s structured content, pre-processed, and parsed, fit to be read by the databases that form the heart of the BF system. If you like, the spider creates a “rendition” of the live web, recast into the form of a structured XML file.

What I propose is that these renditions of blogs should become the target of preservation. This way, we would potentially have a much more manageable preservation task ahead of us, with a limited range of content and behaviours to preserve and reproduce.

If these blog renditions are preservable, then the preservation performance we would like to replicate is the behaviour of the Invenio database, and not live web behaviour. All the preservation strategy needs to do is to guarantee that our normalised objects, and the database itself, conform to the performance model.

When I say “normalised”, I mean the crawled blogs that will be recast in XML. As I’ve suggested previously, XML is already known to be a robust preservation format. We anticipate that all the non-XML content is going to be images, stylesheets, multi-media, stylesheets, and attachments. Preservation strategies for this type of content are already well understood in the digital preservation world, and we can adapt them.

There is already a strand of the project that is concerned with migration of the database, to ensure future access and replay on applications and platforms of the future. This in itself could feasibly form the basis of the long-term preservation strategy.

The preservation promise in our case should not guarantee to recreate the live web, rather to recreate the contents of the BF repository, and to replicate the behaviour of the BF database. After all that is the real value of what the project is offering: searchability, retrievability, and creating structure (parsed XML files) where there is little or no structure (the live blogosphere).

Likewise it’s important that the original order and arrangement of the blogs be supported. I would anticipate that this will be one of the possible views of the harvested content. If it’s possible for an Invenio database query to “rebuild” a blog in its original order, that would be a test of whether preservation has succeeded.

As to PREMIS metadata: in this alternative scenario the live data in the database and the preserved data are one and the same thing. In theory, we should be able to manipulate the database to devise a PREMIS “view” of the data, with any additional fields needed to record our preservation actions on the files.

In short, I wonder whether the project is really doing “web archiving” at all? And does it matter if we aren’t?

In summary I would suggest:

• We consider the target of preservation to be crawled blogs which have been transformed into parsed XML (I anticipate that this would not invalidate the data model).
• We regard the spidering action as a form of “normalisation” which is an important step to transforming unmanaged blog content into a preservable package.
• Following the performance model proposed by National Archives of Australia, we declare the performance we wish to replicate is that of normalised files in the Invenio database, rather than the behaviours of individual blogs. This approach potentially makes it simpler to define “significant properties”; instead of trying to define the significant properties of millions of blogs and their objects, we could concentrate on the significant properties of our normalised files, and of Invenio.

The rise of the blogosphere and the following explosive growth of social media applications and communities have affected greatly our culture and communications. The research community is aware of the need to preserve social media records for future generations. Thus, social media archiving and long term digital preservation has become highly relevant. The key challenges of social media preservation are expanding over many fields including Web archiving, semantic Web, digital preservation, social computing and open access.

Scope

The primary goal of this special issue is to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state of the art and practice of social media preservation and related areas. We are interested not only in papers with algorithmic innovations, but also in leading work on applications, experimental implementations and evaluations. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Social media modeling & analysis
• Current state of social media and trends
• Social Web archiving
• Web digital preservation
• Social network analysis
• Web 2.0 and semantic Web
• Cultural patterns and representations
• Spam detection
• Social media content classification
• Interoperability
• Resource adaptation, allocation and delivery
• Blogs, micro-blogs, internet forums
• Topic detection
• Case studies
• Social media preservation case studies
• Archiving applications and systems
• Blog preservation technologies within applications and services
• Content refreshing, migration, replication, emulation
• Information retrieval
• Topic detection
• Metadata & metadata schemas
• Preservation policies
• Web digital preservation strategies
• Digital rights management

Manuscript submission

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals. Springer offers authors, editors and reviewers of World Wide Web Journal a Web-enabled online manuscript submission and review system. Manuscripts should be submitted to: http://WWWJ.edmgr.com under the article type ‘Social Media Preservation’. All submissions will be reviewed based on technical merit and relevance.

Schedule

Deadline for paper submission: November 1, 2012
First round notification: February 1, 2013
Revised version due: April 1, 2013

Guest Editors

Yannis Manolopoulos
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
manolopo at csd.auth.gr

Alexandra Cristea
University of Warwick, UK
A.I.Cristea at warwick.ac.uk

Dimitrios Katsaros
University of Thessaly, Greece
dkatsar at inf.uth.gr

We shared our booth with the EU project Cyberemotions that examines and visualizes sentiments in e-communities.

Authors: Vangelis Banos, Nikos Baltas, Yannis Manolopoulos

Abstract: Blogging is yet another popular and prominent application in the era of Web 2.0. According to recent measurements often considered as conservative, as of now worldwide there are more than 152 million blogs with content spanning over every aspect of life and science, necessitating long term blog preservation and knowledge management. In this talk, we will present a range of issues that arise when facing the task of blog preservation. We argue that current web archiving solutions are not able to capture the dynamic and continuously evolving nature of blogs, their network and social structure as well as the exchange of concepts and ideas that they foster. Furthermore, we provide directions and objectives that could be reached to realize robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for blogs. Finally, we will introduce the BlogForever EC funded project, its main motivation and findings towards widening the scope of blog preservation.